The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will pay Medicare and Medicaid bonuses for EMRs to practices by the number of physicians and to hospitals based on admissions. But what about other types of provider organizations?
Writing at the EMR and HIPAA blog, John Lynn laments the apparent reality that long-term care facilities--which tend to be run by nurses rather than physicians--are likely to miss out on stimulus funding. "Sadly, if long-term care facilities aren't getting any EMR stimulus money, then it's possible they will lag behind even farther in adoption of healthcare IT," Lynn says. He does hold out hope that the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology might direct some of its discretionary funding to long-term care organizations in the form of EMR grants. "However, that is still yet to be seen," Lynn says.
A couple of comments on the post suggest that dentistry might be in the same boat as long-term care.
For more information:
- check out Lynn's EMR and HIPAA blog post